Neil W. Netanel defines the problem newspapers face in the digital age:

Newspapers thus suffer from the classic public goods problem. Producers of quality journalism invest heavily in investigating, reporting, editing, and fact checking. But once they make their work product available, they cannot prevent many others from copying from and reading their work without payment. In the long run, they will lose out to competitors who build on their investment in quality journalism without making a similar investment in original reporting. In fact, newspapers’ public goods problem extends even wider. We all benefit from a society in which quality reporting is produced and disseminated even if we don’t actually read that reporting ourselves.¹

This is one of my main concerns in the copyright debate. I believe there should be a genuine and tangible incentive potential for the creators of original, quality work. If our concern is the good of the commons, then we should provide incentives for others to contribute to the common good and take steps to protect those incentives.

Regarding newspapers, Thomas Jefferson said:

… were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.²

But he also said:

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.³

I think Jefferson would be thrilled at the possibilities that blogs and other social web tools provide for disseminating information, verifying its accuracy, and debating its significance. On the other hand, I also think he would be concerned about the loss of potential incentives for the investigating, verifying, and editing that Netanel mentions.

I don’t believe that “saving the fourth estate” is the answer, though. I see two currents in media: the concentration of mainstream media under ever-smaller numbers of major corporations, and the distribution of that content online through ever-larger networks. These two currents are in direct opposition, but I hope this won’t mean that either side “wins.”

Instead, I hope the monopoly over mainstream media is broken, resulting in new business models that can provide economic incentives to trained professionals to continue the work of the old estate, but with more freedom than the old estate could afford to allow, resulting in the freedom of content/information sharing paired with the potential economic incentives and other necessary resources of media corporations.

How this might happen, I’m still not sure, though I’ve heard a few good ideas.

Footnotes:

1. The Demise of Newspapers: Economics, Copyright, Free Speech
2. http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff1600.htm
3. http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Thomas_Jefferson